Ferromagnetic fluid as a model of social impact

The paper proposes a new model of spin dynamics which can be treated as a model of sociological coupling between individuals. Our approach takes into account two different human features: gregariousness and individuality. We will show how they affect a psychological distance between individuals and how the distance changes the opinion formation in a social group. Apart from its sociological aplications the model displays the variety of other interesting phenomena like self-organizing ferromagnetic state or a second order phase transition and can be studied from different points of view, e.g. as a model of ferromagnetic fluid, complex evolving network or multiplicative random process.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

What do people think they’re doing? Action identification and human behavior

Issues in the cognitive representation and control of action are broached from the perspective of action identification theory. This theory holds that any action can be identified in many ways, ranging from low-level identities that specify how the action is performed to high-les'el identities that signify why or with what effect the action is performed. The level of identification most likely to be adopted by an actor is said to be dictated by processes reflecting a trade-offbetween concerns for comprehensive action understanding and effective action maintenance. This means that the actor is always sensitive tocontextual cues to higher levels of identification but moves to lower levels of identification if the action proves difficult to maintain with higher level identities in mind. These respective processes are documented empirically, as is their coordinated interplay in promoting a level of prepotent identification that matches the upper limits of the actor's capacity to perform the action. The implications of this analysis are developed for action stability, the psychology of performance impairment, personal versus situational causation, and the behavioral bases of self-understanding. People always seem to be doing something. They also seem to be quite adept at identifying what they are doing. What is less clear is how these two observations relate to one another. The theory of action identification Cognition and Action That people can think about what they do is hardly a controversial idea in psychology. The suggestion, however, that specifiable causal links exist between cognitive representations of action and overt behavior is greeted with skepticism in certain quarters. This skepticism is fueled in part by people's capacit

Rescue Model for the Bystanders' Intervention in Emergencies

To investigate an effect of social interaction on the bystanders' intervention in emergency situations we introduce a rescue model which includes the effects of the victim's acquaintance with bystanders and those among bystanders. This model reproduces the surprising experimental result that the helping rate tends to decrease although the number of bystanders $k$ increases. The model also shows that given the coupling effect among bystanders, for a certain range of small $k$ the helping rate increases according to $k$ and that coupling effect plays both positive and negative roles in emergencies. Finally we find a broad range of coupling strength to maximize the helping rate.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Society of self: The emergence of collective properties in selfstructure

Using cellular automata, the authors show how mutual influences among elements of self-relevant information give rise to dynamism, differentiation, and global evaluation in self-concept. The model assumes a press for integration that promotes internally generated dynamics and enables the self-structure to operate as a self-organizing dynamical system. When this press is set at high values, the self can resist inconsistent information and reestablish equilibrium after being perturbed by such information. A weak press for integration, on the other hand, impairs self-organization tendencies, making the system vulnerable to external information. Paradoxically, external information of a random nature may enhance the emergence of a stable self-structure in an initially disordered system. The simulation results suggest that important global properties of the self reflect the operation of integration processes that are generic in complex systems. When people think about or describe themselves, any number of specific thoughts, memories, fears, and feelings may come to mind. By themselves, however, the cognitive and affective elements that arise during self-reflection do not provide for a sense of self. Rather, a person has a self-concept to the extent that he or she has a relatively coherent structure within which the multitude of self-relevant thoughts and feelings achieve organization. In this sense, the self represents a society of autonomous, yet interdependent and interacting agents. Like a society of individuals, the self can be viewed as a complex dynamical system, with interactions among system elements promoting the emergence of macro-level properties that cannot be reduced to the properties of the elements in isolation. It is only at the level of such emergent properties that one can meaningfully characterize the structure as a whole. People can be said to have high or low self-esteem, for example, only because their thoughts and feelings about themselves are organized in a manner that indicates a relatively coherent evaluation, in much the same way that societies can be said to have norms only because the behaviors of individuals in a population are coordinated in a relatively coherent fashion. This reasoning does not mean that the self is not a unique cognitive structure or that the specific elements of self- by virtue of being the largest structure in the cognitive system, encompassing all personally relevant information derived throughout one's life (e.g., None of these defining aspects and processes of the self would be possible without at least some semblance of integration among self-relevant elements. Before one can verify one's self-concept or maintain a level of self-esteem, after all, one must have a relatively coherent perspective on the vast number of features relevant to self-understanding. It is critical, then, to appreciate the means by which specific cognitive and affective elements are integrated in service of coherent self-understanding. Processes of integration are not unique to the self-system. To the contrary, the issue of how distinct elements become coordinated to form a coherent structure constitutes one of the main challenges facing contemporary science (cf. 3

Self-prioritization and perceptual matching: The effects of temporal construal.

Recent research has revealed that self-referential processing enhances perceptual judgments - the so-called self-prioritization effect. The extent and origin of this effect remains unknown, however. Noting the multifaceted nature of the self, here we hypothesized that temporal influences on self-construal (i.e., past/future-self continuity) may serve as an important determinant of stimulus prioritization. Specifically, as representations of the self increase in abstraction as a function of temporal distance (i.e., distance from now), self-prioritization may only emerge when stimuli are associated with the current self. The results of three experiments supported this prediction. Self-relevance only enhanced performance in a standard perceptual-matching task when stimuli (i.e., geometric shapes) were connected with the current self; representations of the self in the future (Expts. 1 & 2) and past (Expt. 3) failed to facilitate decision making. To identify the processes underlying task performance, data were interrogated using a hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) approach. Results of these analyses revealed that self-prioritization was underpinned by a stimulus bias (i.e., rate of information uptake). Collectively, these findings elucidate when and how self-relevance influences decisional processing

Conceiving “personality”: Psychologist’s challenges and basic fundamentals of the Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals

Scientists exploring individuals, as such scientists are individuals themselves and thus not independent from their objects of research, encounter profound challenges; in particular, high risks for anthropo-, ethno- and ego-centric biases and various fallacies in reasoning. The Transdisciplinary Philosophy-of-Science Paradigm for Research on Individuals (TPS-Paradigm) aims to tackle these challenges by exploring and making explicit the philosophical presuppositions that are being made and the metatheories and methodologies that are used in the field. This article introduces basic fundamentals of the TPS-Paradigm including the epistemological principle of complementarity and metatheoretical concepts for exploring individuals as living organisms. Centrally, the TPS-Paradigm considers three metatheoretical properties (spatial location in relation to individuals’ bodies, temporal extension, and physicality versus “non-physicality”) that can be conceived in different forms for various kinds of phenomena explored in individuals (morphology, physiology, behaviour, the psyche, semiotic representations, artificially modified outer appearances and contexts). These properties, as they determine the phenomena’s accessibility in everyday life and research, are used to elaborate philosophy-of-science foundations and to derive general methodological implications for the elementary problem of phenomenon-methodology matching and for scientific quantification of the various kinds of phenomena studied. On the basis of these foundations, the article explores the metatheories and methodologies that are used or needed to empirically study each given kind of phenomenon in individuals in general. Building on these general implications, the article derives special implications for exploring individuals’ “personality”, which the TPS-Paradigm conceives of as individual-specificity in all of the various kinds of phenomena studied in individuals

When job performance is all relative: how family motivation energizes effort and compensates for intrinsic motivation

Supporting one's family is a major reason why many people work, yet surprisingly little research has examined the implications of family motivation. Drawing on theories of prosocial motivation and action identification, we propose that family motivation increases job performance by enhancing energy and reducing stress, and it is especially important when intrinsic motivation is lacking. Survey and diary data collected across multiple time points in a Mexican maquiladora generally support our model. Specifically, we find that family motivation enhances job performance when intrinsic motivation is low—in part by providing energy, but not by reducing stress. We conclude that supporting a family provides a powerful source of motivation that can boost performance in the workplace, offering meaningful implications for research on motivation and the dynamics of work and family engagement